Sunday, 15 July 2012

This
weekend seems shorter of hours than usual, so there's only time to
record in dispatches a few gigs that have previously gone
unmentioned. I'll try to have something more substantive next time. A
modernist art exhibition that shook up art over a century ago or a
Hollywood movie that doesn't really make much sense, something like
that. (Disclaimer: “more substantive” doesn't imply more
up-to-date.)

Graham
Coxon (seen here saying “ooh yeh yeh”) was of
course instrumental in turning Blur from a godawful Britpop act into
a pretty decent band. (I'd say at that point “before going solo”
but, unbeknownst to me, he actually recorded three solo albums before
that.) I don't normally like guitarists going solo as they tend to...
well, solo, but Coxon's a great songwriter and
even when he went for guitar breaks it felt right rather
than indulgent. It's too far back to say anything clever or
insightful about this gig now (23rd April at the Concorde)
but it was a great night. (No YouTube clips seem to capture a whole
number, alas.)

Sometimes
you need to see a gig outside of Brighton to get back that sense of
an occasion. That it's more about everyone getting
together for a knees-up, and less about seeing some band, going home
and writing a clever blog post about it afterwards. In such a spirit
I once more trusted myself to the 2A bus to see The
Men They Couldn't Hang at the Ropetackle Arts
Centre, in Shoreham-by-Sea (Saturday 12th May 2012). Insofar as I can
recall, the first time I've seen them since the late Eighties.

The
Number One cool thing about this band (you know, apart from their
music) is that they're such a motley array. Spy them separately and
you'd never guess that bunch of people were in a band together. And
only the banjo player (on the left) looks like he should actually be
in a folk-punk band.

This
great gig was only mildly marred by guitarist Cush (to the right)
endlessly admonishing the crowd and treating us to harangues about
not reading the Murdoch press and the like, including during songs.
(Example here.)

This
may well be the fifth time I've seen the inimitable Damo
Suzuki and the second time I've seen him both
with AK/DK and at the Green
Door Store (on Tuesday 19th June). Though the line-up was
rejigged, and instead of a violinist Anne Shenton (off Add N to X)
brought along her theremin.

I may
have liked this night more than the last (as spoken of here.) My only caveat would be that AK/DK are
already quite a Krautrock-influenced unit, so (despite being entirely
improvised) it's still the sort of thing you might expect everyone
assembled to do. Of course I love circular drum patterns as much as
the next man, in fact considerably more so. But when I've seen Damo
with other musicians (or in his parlance “sound carriers”)
there's been more a sense of bold new adventures., of new styles
being hit on out of sheer extemporisation. Randomness = results.
(Check out this random YouTube clip I came across.)

No-one
seems to have uploaded any vids of that particular night, so here's
the self-same clip I posted over it's predecessor. Still, a good cast
is worth repeating and you can hear some of it here.

Since
you asked (okay you didn't), I'm mostly listening to Current 93's
'Thunder Perfect Mind', Beth Gibbons and Rustin
Man's 'Out of Season', At the Drive-In's
'Relationship of Command' and, inevitably enough,
Can. (But not as yet the
fabled Lost Tapes. I'm still figuring out how I'm going to
afford getting those. Any suggestions? I'm currently trying to limit
my options to legal ones...)

Saturday, 7 July 2012

Not
at all a proper review of 'Prometheus', but something of a
follow-upto
this

Prior
to 'Prometheus', Ridley Scott showed little
interest in expanding on films already in the can. Most famously, his
director's cut of 'Blade Runner' did actually cut
- it took more stuff out than it added, and came in at a shorter
running time. For his “director's cut” of 'Alien'
(an ironic term considering the idea was all but forced on him) he
added sequences fans had clamoured to see, but insisted on balancing
them out by removing other scenes. He has shown little interest in
creating a credible origin story of, or even life cycle for, the
Alien. The 'cocoon' scene, which went some way towards
establishing that, was something he'd originally unceremoniously cut.

Me,
I'd have done the same. If I wanted to put back a cut scene, I'd have
included the confrontation between Lambert and Ripley. The 'quarantine'
scene seems a little consequence-less without it. More about the
Alien? It's a killer monster in an enclosed space. That's enough,
isn't it? It should stay unknown. Isn't that more scary?

Then
one day he upped and said “what no one's done is simply gone back to
re-visit 'what was it?' No one's ever said 'who's the space jockey?'
He wasn't an Alien. What was that battleship? Is it a battleship? Is
it an aircraft carrier? Is it a bio-mechanoid weapon carrier?...Why
did it land? Did it crash-land, or did it settle there because it had
engine trouble?...And how long ago?“

...questions
people weren't asking because anyone who cared thought they already
knew, because it was in O'Bannon
and Shusett's original script. That ship was just a prior
victim to the Nostromo, who landed or crashed on the planet to be
overrun by Aliens. They're basically there to have a dead figure at a
giant gun, showing even such advanced weapons couldn't protect them.
They're incidental characters, one big warning sign. It was cut out
of the final version, most likely to keep up the pace but also
because no-one was likely to care where they came from. A skeleton
that falls out of a closet, that doesn't need its autobiography
written. (The real unanswered question might be how the Company knew
about all the Alien in advance, if all this was happening out in deep
space. But that one seems to be staying unasked.)

But
the question gets asked anyway. Then sidelined. For a film fixated on
mutation shows sign of mutation itself. Things shift around so much
we even shift planet. We encounter a different derelict spaceship,
with a different Space Jockey at the helm.

'Prometheus'
is always referencing 'Alien', recycling its
furniture. Yet (as we've seen) 'Alien' was
significant chiefly for its look. And that so-copied look is so
changed here it's like a yang has been built to accompany its yin.
Spaceships are now big, white and gleaming clean, the alien planet is
mostly seen in daylight. It looks, it cannot be denied, absolutely
fantastic. While everyone else has been copying 'Alien',
Scott comes up with something new. But it's also like one of those
disconcerting dreams, where triggers are telling you that you're back
in your old primary school, but everything actually looks entirely
different.

And
it's not just the look that gets yanged. Unlike 'Alien',
the crew are a team of experts carefully assembled for this mission.
(Pretty useless experts who make an even worse fist of it than the
working stiffs of earlier, but never mind that.) Shaw, unlike Ripley,
is a heroine on a quest. The film is full of the 'cosmic wonder' that
made up the other half of Seventies SF, such as '2001' - the
stuff that 'Alien' seemed in such opposition to.
In fact it's Shaw's shadow, the mission director Meredith Vickers
who's most Ripley-like. (Seemingly deliberately, for there's an echo
of the originals' quarantine scene.) The difference is there, bold as
brass, in the names of the ships. Nostromo, from Conrad, is
existential, suggesting hearts of darkness. Prometheus, from Greek
mythology, suggests at cosmic knowledge. (Albeit coming at something
of a price.)

Many
people have commented that this film sets out to answer a question
no-one really asked, then gets sidetracked by a new set of questions,
then fails to answer them either. In the Village Voice, Nick
Pinkerton called it “prone to shallow ponderousness.”

But,
counter to this rather damning verdict, Cavalorn has come up with an interpretation. It's imaginative and worth
reading of itself, so I'll give it the barest summary here. It's
basically the Von Daniken thing of grafting cosmic causes onto Earth
mythology. Just like the King should symbolically die for the
perpetuation of his people, so these Engineers have a cult of
self-sacrifice and have sacrificed themselves (you know, a bit) to
give us life. They're the antithesis of the bestial Aliens, who kill
to survive.

(Which
actually makes the plot line strangely similar to 'Aliens
vs. Predator', just with Engineers substituted for
Predators and another planet for Antarctica. One film awaited by
fans, as the master director finally returns to his creation. The
other damned by fans, seen as a sequel too far, as franchises got
cross-bred to produce bastards. But never mind that...)

Clearly
we have done something quite transgressive to get our elders and
betters so all riled up. Well it could be pretty much any of the
things we've done, take your pick. We've held parties while they were
out, fought wars, screwed the ozone layer, litter-louted our way
across the planet. Except this theory goes in for something specific.
We killed Jesus. Jesus was their emissary, their supply teacher sent
to bring order. And we killed him.

We
know this is true because Ridley Scott said so. (Scott was asked if
he'd considered making any direct references to Jesus and said he
thought that “too on the nose.”)

All
clear? Jesus was a spaceman. We're all very naughty boys and girls.

Except
there's an alternate theory which works just as well. This superior
race, why would we be anything more to them than an experiment?
Anger? We'd be lucky to rouse anything more than mild disappointment?
We're just something to set up and observe, then when you're finished
rinse out the petri dish and start again.

“Maybe
there was something half a billion years ago which was a civilisation
equal to ours? ...could we have existed before and if we did, who or
what destroyed it? But also, who created us and who kicked it all off
again?”

In
other words, this isn't the first time the petri dish has been rinsed
out. It's just the first time it's happened to us.

...which
puts an interesting spin on things. Vickers says at one point “a
king has his reign, and then he dies. It's inevitable.” The film's
villain, Peter Weyland, this time's face of the faceless Company,
plots to resist this and of course fails. All things have their time,
whether individuals or species. Maybe the Engineers, while seeing
themselves as keepers of our time, imagine themselves as above and
immune. Yet they find themselves susceptible to their own rules, and
come to the same fate. On what is technically known as 'an irony',
their own creations in their weapons lab rise up to finish them off.
(The Space Jesusers, meanwhile, don't have much of an explanation for
what actually bumps off the cosmically superior, all-wise Engineers.)

It's
a generalisation, but still a helpful one, to claim American SF tends
to the optimistic and British SF to the pessimistic. In for example
'The Day the Earth Stood Still' (1951) the alien
visitor is essentially Jesus, accompanied by a robot Archangel. While
in for example 'Quatermass and the Pit', (1958)
the aliens are quite explicitly devils. (Or more accurately our folk
devils are a kind of race memory of aliens. Same difference.) Out of
the Alien sequels, 'Alien 3' was dubbed
“nihilistic” and fared badly in the US, but was more popular
abroad. (Yet let's not make this too schematic. This video rant suggests the opposition is all down to Atlantic
differences. But in his bio Cavalorn mentions owning a
bookshop in Manchester...)

An
American movie with a British director, that could maybe go either
way. Last time round it took the pessimistic route, so maybe now
that'll get yanged. Or, more interestingly, perhaps it'll take both
ways at once. Perhaps what's intended is some SF version of 'The
Innocents', like one of those drawings which makes up a
face whichever way up you hold it. Which would be a cool idea.
Ambiguity, after all, is what keeps art alive, while certainty damns
it into being done with.

Unfortunately
then, it actually can't be read either way. It's
not two drawings in one, it's no drawings in one.
Whichever direction you choose, you soon run into walls. Let's go
through just a couple...

Of
course it's something of a category error to fault movies for
employing movie logic. In movie job interviews you pass by telling
the interviewer imploringly “I need this”, not by spelling things
right on your CV. You win movie wars by getting very cross and
running shouting into a hail of bullets, never mind that training. If
you take an instant dislike to a new movie co-worker, you will end up
shagging them within the next thirty minutes. It's a different
country. They do things differently there.

So
maybe we should cut movie DNA some slack. If it in no way conforms to
the rules of our-world DNA, then just imagine a subliminal disclaimer
coming up on the screen, explaining that it differs from our DNA in
any way favoured by the script.

But
a movie Jesus? Okay they're talking about the
mythologised Jesus of Jungian archetypes and bad New Age self-help
books, and that “all-myths-correlate” claptrap the
likes of Christian Vogler likes to come out with. But
they're still talking about Jesus, they still want that cultural
weight the Christian Jesus has.

And
while I'm not the most knowledgeable person about Christianity, I
still remember my school hymns. One of which went “he died to save
us all.” Jesus comes here knowing he has to die. When his disciples
resist his arrest, he tells them to stand down. He sacrifices himself
to atone for our sins. It says so on the page. Crucifixion isn't even
part of the plan, it is the fershluggin' plan! So
how come Jesus' space buddies get so all-fired cross over a plan that
worked?

It's
like Kurt Vonnegut's take on the Bible, that poor plot construction
led to its actual message being “before you kill somebody, make
absolutely sure he isn't well connected.” If you don't believe in
it, fair enough. Neither do I. But don't then try to bend its
cultural weight. Why not have a kick-ass gun-totin' Jesus? Or a
corporate-head plotting-Earth-acquisition Jesus?

And
besides, even if you can buy Space Jesus as Movie Jesus, isn't the
whole schtick of the Engineers supposed to be self-sacrifice?
Wouldn't laying yourself down seem a noble mission? And, with their
vast superiority over us, wouldn't they at least guess it might be
coming?

Meanwhile,
in a more narrative problem, the Space Jesus theorists have a hard
time explaining the star maps. Described in the film as “an
invitation”, they seem planted to draw us into visiting the planet.
Why bother with all that, especially when its not even the Engineers'
home planet, if their plan is for them to visit us and bump us off?
Isn't that like having an air drop of escape routes before you bomb a
town?

Whereas
the petri dish theory explains this quite well. In figuring out the
star maps and developing the technology to take us there, we're like
the mouse in the maze triggering the electric shock. We effectively
press our own delete key. We're signalling the experiment's
developed to its conclusion, and the petri dish can be rinsed out
again.

It
just has trouble explaining so much other stuff,
that's all. The film starts with an Engineer, seemingly sacrificing
himself to seed life on Earth. Later, the Space Jockey seems angered
by our presence. Neither of which seems the reactions of white coated
guys, wondering how the mice got out of their cage, hoping clearing
this up doesn't delay lunch. More like a Dad whose found out the
teens borrowed the car without asking, then crashed it into the cop
shop.

(The
Space Jesus theory does, however, have the advantage of explaining
why the film is so elliptical and incomplete. Obviously the core of
it has been cut out to avoid controversy, and allow the film to play
in mid America!)

Moreover,
both these explanations rely not on extrapolation rather than
imagination. There is more making up of stuff than there is watching
the film. Take that black goo, where's that at? First it creates
human life, then later it mutates it into something else? Begetter or
killer, where is it at? Cavalorn has an answer, it's judgement
goo:

“the
black slime... evidently models its behaviour on the user's mental
state. Create unselfishly, accepting self-destruction as the cost,
and the black stuff engenders fertile life. But expose the potent
black slimy stuff to the thoughts and emotions of flawed humanity,
and 'the sleep of reason produces monsters'... The black slime reacts
to the nature and intent of the being that wields it.”

Which
is an imaginative and intriguing idea. It's just a shame it wasn't
included in the film 'Prometheus'. It might have
fitted quite nicely there. As it is, the black goo of the film is
just magic pixie dust, obliging the script with whatever is required
of it.

What
to do when nothing fits? The two most likely answers are i) argue
about it over blog posts like this, without getting anywhere, or ii)
wait for the sequel. For in the final minutes we're tipped off there
may be a sequel which may even explain some of this.

As
said previously, what in many ways made 'Alien'
such a great film was that it reflected its era. And
'Prometheus' does the same thing, only in a
slightly different way.

Once
upon a time films were things that were shown in cinemas, at fixed
times advertised in the local press. They were enclosed events. You'd
see them, maybe talk about them in the pub afterwards and go home.
Seeing a film now is never a done task.

This
film, for example, is not an event in itself but one more step in an
ongoing marketing campaign. Yes it came after the teasers, the
trailers and the viral ads. But it comes before the commentaries, the
director's cut, the multi-DVD release and the inevitable sequel. In
fact, once we've paid our ticket money what's then shown to us
virtually is a teaser for the sequel. Which, if made, will in itself
become a teaser for the next sequel, and so on.

In
'Alien' there's an alien on a spaceship. The crew
have to get rid of it before it does them in. Which they finally
manage, and then the credits roll. In 'Prometheus'...
well, what did bloody happen? It's not allusive or
creatively ambiguous, it's frustratingly incomplete. And we
still don't even know the answer to very question
which brought us here, how that Space Jockey, the
first one, got there, Maybe they're saving that up for the third
instalment.

But
then what did you ever expect?

The
more you think about this film, the less you find in it. I suspect
writing about it here has lowered it in my estimations. You're really
just supposed to go “whoo... far out space stuff,” and any other
response is a category error. You're better off treating it like a
pop star interview in the music press, lots of sharp-sounding stuff
thrown out, which is actually just froth and sound-bites. It can't
stand up to any examination but, you know, it has great cheekbones.

Sunday, 1 July 2012

“'Jaws'
in space” was the pitch Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett put to
their initial script for 'Alien'. Yet no studio
wanted to make “'Jaws' in space”. Then, as
all now openly admit, it was hurriedly green-lit following the
success of 'Star Wars' - fairly hilariously, as it
would be hard to think of two films more unlike each other. In 1979
it finally hit the screens.

When
both films notched up hits under the same genre label, science
fiction was back in mainstream cinema. 'Star Wars'
of course brought the bigger swell of immediate cash-ins. (It looked
pretty easy, after all. You just needed a hero with a ray gun, a
villain in black and a girl in a silver bikini.) But in terms of
lasting influence, 'Alien' had the bigger impact.
I have lost count of the times I have stumbled back from the pub on a
weekend, clicked on the telly and immediately gone ”Ah,
'Alien' cash-in.” Even films which aren't simple
spoiler products, which have their own plots and agendas can show
it's imprint.

...an
imprint which comes chiefly through it's design, the dirtied-down
anti-sleek look O'Bannon called “the used future.” It's like
industrial gothic meets surrealist nightmare beneath some severe
under-lighting. 'Star Wars' stemmed from the
gaudy, adventurous world of Saturday morning serials and comics, with
the Marvel adaptation decided early. It was a previously critically
rated arthouse director going mainstream. 'Alien'
was the other way up, taking notions from the margins to the
mainstream. It's chief visual designers were ex-underground
cartoonist Ron Cobb (who had previously worked with O'Bannon on
'Dark Star') and gothic surrealist artist HR
Giger.

But
also, from the weird-sounding transmission which kicks off the plot,
'Alien' always seemed to overlap with contemporary
music, particularly the then-emerging genre of industrial music.
(Check out Throbbing Gristle's 'Hamburger Lady.)
Indeed, Graeme Revell of industrial band SPK later became a Hollywood composer.

Yet
the paradox is that a film which spawned so many sequels and copyists
actually occupies a strange kind of pivot-point between Seventies and
Eighties cinema. This emphasis on look and design in itself makes
that film that classic of the Seventies – mainstream auteurist.

There's
a kind of myth that's now arisen around the idea 'Alien'
was fertilized by the shit of B-movie schlock. Whereas it actually
owes most to Hawkes' acclaimed 'The Thing From Another
World' (1951). 'It! The Terror From Beyond
Space' (1958) has a more headline-style title and may well
have been an actual B Feature (shown as a warm-up for the film
audiences had actually paid to see). But it's actually a much better
film than any of that suggests. Scott was simply too smart to take
influence from bad films when he could have looked at good ones.

Nevertheless,
it's fair to say the plot line is pure B-movie. It's only in
seeing it, the deranged designs, that unsettling
strangeness, the pressure-cooker effect of events on the crew, that
it becomes effective. O'Bannon and Shusett's script may have
languished so long simply because it wasn't designed to work on the
page, it needed a strong visual imagination to bring it to life.
Their work is important, of course, but the film is rightly thought
of as Ridley Scott's 'Alien'.

Moreover,
you don't just not get the atmosphere from the plot, you also don't
get the theme. In another zeitgeisty moment,
'Alien' is seen as a crossover between a science
fiction and a slasher film. Notably the two sequel-spawning staples
of the slasher genre bookend it, 'Halloween' in
1978 and 'Friday the 13th' in 1980.
Certainly, the same formula is there – chop away at the cast until
you're left with the monster and the last girl. But there's important
differences. Perhaps I shouldn't generalise about a genre I don't
follow or care for, but I contend the formula of slasher films is
'sex sublimated into violence.' When the sex can't get any more
explicit for a mainstream film, somebody gets chopped up instead. (A
far more savoury sight, of course.)

Whereas,
and unusually for a mainstream film, 'Alien' not
only doesn't have any sex scenes, it doesn't even bother with romance
subplots. (An early idea was that Ripley and Dallas would be
together, but it never seemed a notion the film's events would lead
to them getting together.) True, at the end
Sigourney Weaver strips down to her scanties. But that's to emphasise
her vulnerability. (Well, you know, partly.)

Instead
the sexuality is thrust upon the alien and the landscape. Sexual
imagery abounds (penetration, gestation) but transformed into
something horrific and otherly - like a universe that's out to rape
you. The Alien is not just horrific but also icky. Slime is a signpost to horror here and in all the sequels. Most crucially, it doesn't just invade their ship, it
invades the human body. The theme is Body horror, something then absent from most SF or even slasher
films.

Crucially
for this to be effective, the crew is composed not of bold astronauts
but regular working guys. This comes straight from scripter Dan
O'Bannon's previous feature 'Dark Star.' (Whose
plot is effectively the crew going insane through the monotony of
space travel, the trucking without the pit stops.)
In 'Beautiful
Monsters: The Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to the Alien and
Predator Films'David McIntee notes that part of the film's effectiveness in frightening viewers "comes
from the fact that the audience can all identify with the
characters...Everyone aboard the Nostromo
is a normal, everyday, working Joe just like the rest of us. They
just happen to live and work in the future."

Furthermore,
the film is steeped in a kind of anti-corporate cynicism, a common
theme among auteurist films of the era. Pakula's 'The
Parallax View' (1974), for example, though ostensibly a
thriller, was set in such a strange defamiliarised modernist
environment it's almost an honorary SF film. Yaphet Kotto, who plays
Parker, had only just starred in Schrader's anti-corporate drama
'Blue Collar' (1978). Similarly, here the Alien
may be the adversary but the Company are effectively the villain,
through their attempts to get their clutches on it they put the crew
in danger.

Yet
the peculiarity of 'Alien' is to come at the end
of this era. Significantly, its release coincided
with two big signposts of political change, the elections of Margaret
Thatcher (1979) and Ronald Reagan (1981). Initially there's an
upstairs-downstairs division between the crew, with grunts Parker and
Brett attempting to demand parity in “the bonus situation.” But
ship's Captain Dallas resembles the “Carter power” which the Dead
Kennedys were predicting to “soon go away.” Such distinctions
soon erode under the alien threat, and after some accelerated
Darwinism 'downstairs' Parker and 'upstairs' Ripley are the last to
survive. It's the modern world. Career paths don't go to plan any
more. You can only rely on yourself.

It
would be tempting to claim the Alien as the market, a ruthless
self-serving machine we can only organise ourselves around. As is
said of it at one point, “its structural perfection is matched only
by its hostility.” (Should the tag line have been “in the
neoliberal mode of production, no-one can hear you scream?”)
Indeed, the motor here and in the sequels is the Company forever
trying to catch and weaponise the Alien. And wanting to have
the Alien is akin to wanting to be like it. But
their plans are forever going awry. The Alien is more likely the
natural world, the cycle of life the Company seek to control and
dominate.

Yet
this just leads us into something more crucial. Ash says of it, “I
admire it's purity. A survivor...unclouded by conscience, remorse or
delusions of morality.” But this description also fits Ripley, who
was willing to leave the others in quarantine rather than risk
infection aboard the ship. Ultimately, Ripley doesn't win because she
is more moral, she survives because she is tougher and smarter. She's
the human being most similar to the Alien. Significantly the film
ends with her final log, not a stirring speech or smart sound-bite,
but a simple, direct statement of survival.

Significantly,
neither 'Halloween' nor 'Friday the
13th
felt obliged to keep the same female protagonist through their
sequels. It's easier to get in a fresh crop of nubile girlies to get
their kit off and then get offed, then another for the next one.
After all, it's the guy with the chopper and the hockey mask people
have come to see. Yet the Alien films all have to feature Ripley,
just like you couldn't make a Dalek film without the Doctor. (Unless
of course you count the '...vs. Predator' films.
Which we don't.)

So...
the look of the film is hugely influential, and the themes can only
be found if seen through the prism of that look. But the look stuck
while those themes would disappear not only in the imitators, but by
the first direct sequel. The working crew, are replaced by (in order)
space marines, monastic convicts and galactic outlaws. Their crossing
and improvised dialogue is swapped for the reading of often-quotable
lines. In short, the characters in the sequel films are characters
from films. Ripley reappears, it's true, but with fading
recognisability. By the fourth she's virtually become a superhero.

Sequels
have many of the trappings of fanfic. One of which is, under the
guise of 'developing' themes, making explicit what worked much better
when implicit. A classic example is the accelerating literalism of
the comparison between Ripley and the Alien. Let's count 'em. When
she starts looking after a child instead of a cat, there's suddenly
an Alien queen with her brood. Then she gets effectively pregnant
with an alien. Then she becomes part-alien. If they'd made a fifth
sequel, perhaps they could have swapped over roles entirely, and
she'd chase the Alien in it's underwear through some gothic-looking
set. (The poster for the third film was a comparison shot of Ripley and the Alien's heads.)

Similarly,
an effective component of the Company's ruthless inhumanity is the
way they lie unseen, existing only as offstage orders. They're not
even named, they're simply referred to as 'the Company'. That last
job you were laid off from, did you ever meet the guy who made the
decision? Of course not! Someone, somewhere simply sent a message
saying “crew expendable.”

Their
one visual representative, Ash, turning out to be an android is
perfect. How many times have you spoken to somebody representing a
corporation who as the conversation went on became more and more like
a machine? The personalised villains of the sequels do not add
anything, do not tell us more about the Company or how it functions.
They simply take stuff away.

But
overall, if the sequels break away from the original that's their
strength rather than their weakness. If you're going to do sequels,
that's how you need to do them. Movies are
standalone, they don't work well as chapters in an overarching
storyline. Each film is made by a new director with a new angle, a
new visual style and no thought of further sequels. Then another new
crew come in and do the same.

It's
not so much passing the baton as handing someone your car keys and
telling them to go nuts. Of course, they crash the car. But they
crash it somewhere else, in some new way,
unforeseeable from where it was last parked. They're all, of course,
inferior to the first film. But by minimising the points of
comparison they give themselves the best fighting chance.

Take
the way the Alien is designed slightly differently in each. While of
course the original was the perfect killing machine. It's like the
way sharks and crocodiles have stayed as they are for millennia,
without need of evolution. Change is pointless. But necessary. You
either mutate the Alien or throw in the towel.

Of
course each is, in it's own way, flawed. But perhaps significantly
the least flawed, the most functionally effective,
is the second one, 'Aliens' – which essentially
turns the whole thing into one big battle. (The tag line, “this
time it's war”, effectively tipped us off - “this time it's not
really an 'Alien' film”.) It succeeds most by
attempting least. (My personal favourite among the sequels is the
third. Despite it being... you know... flawed.)

And
of course through breaking away they escaped the other great trap of
sequels or fanfic – of wanting to explain or elaborate on things
from the original, to answer questions no-one was actually interested
in asking. They old stuff was just a springboard. Now it's time to
make new stuff up. Which was better for all concerned.

And This Is Me...

From his base in Brighton, England, Gavin Burrows has badgered the foolish and unwary with a plethora of comic strips, articles, polemics, drunken rants and nuisance phone calls for over thirty years now. (NB While he may write about music from time to time he has no musical abilities of any kind, the DJ, producer and remix artist is another fellah!) His favourite subjects are film, music, comics and visual art... or anything which might be able to induce a lucid frenzy.

Also to be found at...

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